We introduce the Special Issue on Life Science in Politics: Methodological Innovations and Political Issues. This issue of Politics and the Life Sciences is focused on the use of life science theory and methods to study political phenomena and the exploration of the intersection of science and political attitudes. This issue is the third in a series of special issues funded by the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences that adheres to the Open Science Framework for registered reports. Pre-analysis plans are peer reviewed and given in-principle acceptance before data are collected and/or analyzed, and the articles are published contingent upon the preregistration of the study being followed as proposed. We note various interpretations and challenges associated with studying the science of politics and discuss the contributions.

The COVID-19 pandemic has spotlighted the importance of high-quality data for empirical health research and evidence-based political decision-making. To leverage the full potential of these data, a better understanding of the determinants and conditions under which people are willing to share their health data is critical. Building on the privacy theory of contextual integrity, the privacy calculus, and previous findings regarding different data types and recipients, we argue that established social norms shape the acceptance of novel practices of data collection and use. To investigate the willingness to share health data, we conducted a preregistered vignette experiment. The scenarios experimentally varied the vignette dimensions by data type, recipient, and research purpose. While some findings contradict our hypotheses, the results indicate that all three dimensions affected respondents' data sharing decisions. Additional analyses suggest that institutional and social trust, privacy concerns, technical affinity, altruism, age, and device ownership influence the willingness to share health data.

While the effects of climate change will impact most Americans, they will likely have a disproportionate influence on the socioeconomic well-being of marginalized communities. Few researchers, however, have investigated public support for policies aimed at ameliorating climate-related disparities. Fewer still have considered how political and (critically) pre-political psychological dispositions might shape environmental justice concern (EJC) and subsequently influence policy support—both of which, I argue, could present roadblocks for effective climate communication and policy action. In this registered report, I (1) propose and validate a new measure of EJC, (2) explore its political correlates and pre-political antecedents, and (3) test for a link between EJC and policy support. In addition to psychometrically validating the EJC scale, I find that pre-political value orientations are associated with EJC, which, in turn, mediates the effects of pre-political values on taking action to mitigate the unequal effects of climate change.

People vary in climate change skepticism and in their views on disaster cause and prevention. For example, the United States boasts higher rates of climate skepticism than other countries, especially among Republicans. Research into the individual differences that shape variation in climate-related beliefs represents an important opportunity for those seeking ways to mitigate climate change and climate-related disasters (e.g., floods). In this registered report, we proposed a study examining how individual difference in physical formidability, worldview, and affect relate to attitudes about disaster and climate change. We predicted that highly formidable men would tend to endorse social inequality, hold status quo defensive worldviews, report lower levels of empathy, and report attitudes that promote disaster risk accumulation via lesser support for social intervention. The results of an online study (Study 1) support the notion that men's self-perceived formidability is related to disaster and climate change beliefs in the predicted direction and that this relationship is mediated by hierarchical worldview and status quo defense but not empathy. An analysis of a preliminary sample for the in-lab study (Study 2) suggests that self-perceived formidability relates to disaster views, climate views, and status quo maintaining worldviews.

This is a registered report for a study of racial and ethnic variation in the relationship between negativity bias and political attitudes. Pioneering work on the psychological and biological roots of political orientation has suggested that political conservatism is driven in large part by enhanced negativity bias. This work has been criticized on several theoretical fronts, and recent replication attempts have failed. To dig deeper into the contours of when (and among whom) negativity bias predicts conservatism, we investigate a surprisingly overlooked factor in existing literature: race and ethnicity. We propose that political issues represent threat or disgust in different ways depending on one's race and ethnicity. We recruited 174 White, Latinx, and Asian American individuals (in equal numbers) to examine how the relationship between negativity bias and political orientation varies by race/ethnicity across four domains: policing/criminal justice, immigration, economic redistribution, and religious social conservatism.

The stark divide between the political right and left is rooted in conflicting beliefs, values, and personality—and, recent research suggests, perhaps even lower-level physiological differences between individuals. In this registered report, we investigated a novel domain of ideological differences in physiological processes: interoceptive sensitivity—that is, a person's attunement to their own internal bodily states and signals (e.g., physiological arousal, pain, and respiration). We conducted two studies testing the hypothesis that greater interoceptive sensitivity would be associated with greater conservatism: one laboratory study in the Netherlands using a physiological heartbeat detection task and one large-scale online study in the United States employing an innovative webcam-based measure of interoceptive sensitivity. Contrary to our predictions, we found evidence that interoceptive sensitivity may instead predict greater political liberalism (versus conservatism), although this association was primarily limited to the American sample. We discuss implications for our understanding of the physiological underpinnings of political ideology.

U.S. states are often the primary decision makers during a public health crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic led to several different reopening processes across states based on their unique characteristics. We analyze whether states' reopening policy decisions were driven by their public health preparedness, resources, COVID-19 impact, or state politics and political culture. To do so, we summarized state characteristics and compared them across three categories of reopening scores in a bivariate analysis using the chi-square or Fisher exact test for the categorical variables and a one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) for the continuous variables. A cumulative logit model was used to assess the primary research question. A significant factor in a state's reopening decision was the party of the governor, regardless of the party in control of the legislature, state political culture, public health preparedness, cumulative number of deaths per 100,000, and Opportunity Index score.

Scholars and journalists connect pandemics to a rise in support for radical political movements. In this study, we draw on this insight to investigate the relationship between the 1918–1919 Spanish influenza pandemic and political extremism—here, the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan—in the United States. Specifically, we ask whether U.S. states and cities with higher death rates from the Spanish flu also had stronger Ku Klux Klan organizations in the early 1920s. Our results do not provide evidence of such a connection; in fact, the data suggest greater Klan membership where the pandemic was less severe. This provides initial evidence that pandemic severity, as measured by mortality, is not necessarily a cause of extremism in the United States; power devaluation as a result of social and cultural change, however, does appear to spur such mobilization.

Sleep research presents an important frontier of discovery for political science. While sleep has largely been neglected by political scientists, human psychology is inextricably linked with sleep and so political cognition must be as well. Existing work shows that sleep is linked to political participation and ideology, and that contentious politics can disrupt sleep. I propose three directions for future research—on participatory democracy, on ideology, and on how context shapes sleep-politics links. I also note that sleep research intersects with the study of political institutions, of war and conflict, of elite decision-making, and of normative theory. In short, political scientists across subfields can and should consider whether and how sleep influences political life in their area of expertise and how to influence relevant policies. This new research agenda will enrich our theories of politics and enable us to identify pressing areas for policy interventions to revitalize our democracy.